The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction

In the wake of the extremely bloody First World War, the new genre of crime fiction began to flourish and was eagerly embraced by the reading public. A century later, as the bloody twenty-first century limbers up, crime writing has become the most popular fiction genre of all. How come?

The answer of course is that, no matter how vociferously we deny it, we all have a sneaking fascination with murder and murderers, and an admiration for the men and women who track them down. As Ian Rankin notes in his foreword to this excellent guide, ‘People are interested in crime fiction because they are fascinated by the margins of the world, those places where society’s rules break down.’ None of us wants to be the victim of crime, but we seem to enjoy an almost unseemly, prurient delight in reading about it.

Fictional crimes have been committed over the last century by all manner of cunning, desperate and deranged individuals, and solved by everyone from a pipe-smoking cocaine addict to a fashion-conscious Chicago PI to a gloomy Italian policeman with a distinctly Japanese-sounding surname.

From 1950s Budapest and the swamps around New Orleans to the splendour (and squalor) of present-day Edinburgh, it is possible to find a crime novel set in whichever part of the world you happen to be visiting. (Scandinavia and Italy seem to be particularly dangerous places to go these days if the number of fictional murders taking place there is anything to go by.)

But perhaps crime fiction’s greatest strength is its ability to portray any class of people or any type of society in any state of flux at any given period of time. Ian Rankin again: ‘I continue to find the crime novel the perfect vehicle for a discussion of contemporary issues in the most unflinching terms.’

There is (almost) always a murder to solve and a killer to be traced, but there is also much more: a depiction of life in a medieval monastery (the Brother Cadfael mysteries); a scathing indictment of 1980s consumerism (American Psycho); the dissection of disastrous personal relationships (virtually every modern detective); an attack on the power of pharmaceutical companies (The Constant Gardener). The sheer breadth of crime writers’ scope and ambition is astonishing.

Forshaw’s guide is an excellent distillation of the best crime writing of the last century. From Agatha Christie’s ‘country house’ murders and Mickey Spillane’s pulp fiction, to Robert Harris's counterhistorical Fatherland and Karin Fossum’s bestselling Norwegian crime novels, Forshaw has chosen books that encapsulate each sub-genre. Crucially, he justifies their inclusion with wit and lightly-worn erudition.

At a time when publishers are churning out more crime fiction than ever before, and, moreover, keeping in print many older but still popular titles, this Rough Guide is a timely and necessary survey of a genre whose popularity shows no sign of dwindling.